


two pumpkins & a couple sixers

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: Domestic, Halloween Challenge, M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:27:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Halloween as it unfolds in 2012, 2013, and 2014. With a little bit of love & feeling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2012

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [TD Halloween Challenge](http://thisissomehalloweenshit.tumblr.com/). This fills perhaps four or five different prompts and was tentatively crafted within the realm of my ["What We've Got"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1353625/chapters/2825230) universe but I ain't making any promises.

The night before Halloween, Marty says he’s heading out on a beer run and comes back home fifteen minutes later than usual toting three plastic grocery bags and a pair of pumpkins balanced in the crook of each elbow.

Rust thinks vaguely about neo-Christian constructs and brightly-colored consumerism, and then more distinctly about two weeks ago in the supermarket when Marty made a point to steer clear of the orange-and-black aisles strung with fake cobwebs, like bags of milk chocolate and plastic hockey masks were old stories he couldn’t brush elbows with in public. Rust could see him straining against some self-inflicted invisible bonds as they passed into the hardware department, looking away on purpose, a magnet trying to resist the pull.

Two weeks later, Rust thinks a little about inevitability.

“Are you gonna stand there and gawk at me or take one of these?” Marty huffs, toeing the front door shut behind him. His cheeks are bitten pink from the wind and the cool smell of autumn has soaked down into the fiber of his flannel shirt, something crisp and earthy-sweet that Rust wants to nose into and suck down in lieu of breathing.

“Pumpkins,” he says instead, like it’s a foreign word, holding out his hands to relieve Marty of one squash plus two of the bags. _What the fuck did you buy pumpkins for?_ weighs heavy on the flat of his tongue but all that comes out in the end is, “You bought pumpkins.”

“Uh—yeah, Rust,” Marty says a little cagily, edging around with too-precise movements as he stows a couple six-packs in the fridge. He dumps the other bags out on the counter to reveal a rainbow mix of candy, different chocolates and sweets galore, and when he looks back up he thumps the flat of his hand against the hollow orange, not quite meeting Rust’s eye. “Neighborhood kids’ll be out in full force. Figured I’d do a little something this year.”

Rust’s eyes flick over the sprawl and then back up to Marty, focusing somewhere along the line of his jaw. He breathes out a sigh and touches the uglier of the two pumpkins, staking claim, tipping it forward to look at every angle. “You got a serrated knife you don’t care too much about?”  
  
  
  


Sitting out on the back patio under a blanket of cricket song, Marty sinks his hand down into the innards of his pumpkin and draws a handful out, slapping it down on the sheet of newspaper laid out between them. It’s orange and stringy but he still swallows hard, feeling the glop squelch wet between his fingers.

For once, he doesn’t mind that it’s cold.

“Save the guts,” Rust says, disemboweling his own pumpkin with the practiced indifference of a slaughterhouse worker. “Can boil and roast the seeds with some salt later.”

“Alright then,” Marty snorts, working on scraping the inner walls with the edge of a soup ladle he peeled the sticker off of not ten minutes ago. “If the rapture comes down on us one of these days, I reckon you’re coming with me.”

“Pumpkin seeds ain’t gonna do us much good then,” Rust mumbles around a cigarette clenched between his teeth. He wedges his pumpkin between his knees to keep it steady, running his fingers over bumps and imperfections trying to figure the best working canvas. He doesn’t touch the black marker brought to sketch and outline, merely flips open his pocketknife and starts carving, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth while he works.

Twenty minutes later, Marty fits the top of his jack-o’-lantern into place and clears his throat. Rust looks up and finds a crude face staring back at him, all snaggletooth smile and a set of eyebrows locked in everlasting consternation.

“Kinda looks like you, don’t he?” Marty says, grinning easy. “Needs a cigarette and a can of that horse piss to complete the look.”

“I’ve got better teeth than that,” Rust murmurs, though the line of his mouth wavers a little at the edges as he carves one last shape and wipes his knife along the hem of his flannel. He slips his cigarettes into a shirt pocket and stands, taking up the pumpkin with him. “You got any candles?”

“You’re done?” Marty asks, stooping to fold up everything into a square of newspaper before following the other man back into the house. “Uh—think I got some somewhere, lemme go hunt them down.”

Both pumpkins touch down on the top step of the front porch, now gone dark with the first fallen hour of night. Rust lights another cigarette and then flicks his zippo back into life, touching it to the wick of a white tea light. Marty presses another into his hand and he sets them in a pumpkin apiece before straightening, standing there smoking, a familiar grey outline inlaid with a burning pinch of garnet ember.

“Come out here for a second,” Marty says after a moment, eyeballing the neat symbols carved into Rust’s pumpkin, stars and a sickle and what looks like a crescent moon quartered up inside a glowing ring of light. “Wanna see how they look from the street.”

They come to stand between the light-throw of two streetlamps, shoulders almost brushing but not quite. “You know I’m gonna ask you what the fuck that is,” Marty says, dragging his right shoe across the pavement with a quiet scuffing sound. “If it’s some kind of Satanist shit the neighbors are gonna talk, man. Probably more than they already do.”

“Protection sigil,” Rust says on exhale, immersed in a rising cloud of blue-violet smoke. “Meant to safeguard a new home.”

“Well,” Marty says, looking down at his feet, Rust’s hands, the mismatched pumpkins sitting together on the top step. “I’ll be damned.”

He waits until they get back inside before he kisses him.  
  
  
  



	2. 2013

Rust roams the aisles like a divinity through feeble masses, some kind of middle-aged deity draped in plaid traveling earth’s walkways in a tireless kind of pilgrimage—soft-eyed and lulled under the spell of his own convictions, thrumming with the veiled blood-beat of something wild that would gush to the surface like black gold if only given the chance. He is not here to look. He is only passing through, having already seen all that there is, was, ever will be.

They have been in the video rental store for six minutes.

Marty watches him stroll up through the pysch thrillers empty-handed, stepping into the horror aisle without deigning any of the blood-spattered covers a second glance. Perhaps because he does not care, Marty thinks—this man who never did see _Titanic_ in the theater or anywhere else for that matter, not until Marty himself nearly stroked out on the living room couch one night a couple months back and pulled up a bootleg copy on his laptop. Or perhaps because the oversaturated corn syrup red never could compare. Not to the real thing.

“You find anything yet?” is all Rust says though, blinking sleepy despite the contrary, and when he reaches for a shelf it’s only to straighten a DVD case that sits cockeyed in contrast to the ones stacked behind it. “We gotta get back to the house before dark.”

Marty quits reading the synopsis on the back of a _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ reboot halfway down and cuts his eyes back up to Rust. “What for? You eager to hand out Sweet Tarts and Milky Ways all a sudden?”

“Maybe,” Rust says. He’s fallen into his pensive cowboy stance, one hand hitched up on his hip with the other balanced on the closest shelf. “More like I was gonna sit out on the porch with my gun, help anybody who tries to egg the house reconsider their holiday priorities.”

“It’s a goddamn wonder you were ever licensed to carry at all,” Marty says, but when their eyes meet his mouth turns up at one corner, splitting into a lopsided grin. “Hell, what do you think I keep that airsoft around for?”

“Christ, just hurry up and pick out a movie,” Rust says without any real heat. “Knowing you, we won’t even get halfway through it anyhow. Starting to think you pick the shittiest fucking films in the place on purpose.”

Marty picks up and sets down _Carrie_ like all he ever meant to do was touch it, laughing low and raspy in his throat. “That’s strategy, Rust,” he says, strolling jaunty down the aisle until he plucks another title off the shelf and waggles it in the air. “All part of the _strategy.”_

“Is that the one?” Rust asks, and when Marty nods he breathes out a sigh that sounds older than time itself.

“Cult classic,” Marty says, popping him light on the hip with the case as they head toward checkout.  “You’re gonna love it.”

“Seen a lot of cult classics firsthand,” Rust murmurs toward the carpet, pressing the sole of his boot over a kidney-shaped stain on the cobalt blue. “Love’s probably not the word I’d use.”

Marty throws the movie case down on the counter with a little more force than he intended, startling the blonde busy snapping gum by the computer. “All we’re doing for the rest of the night,” he says, fishing his wallet out of his jeans, “is pumping you full of booze and sugar and good American TV.”

“That all?” Rust says over his shoulder, already edging toward the door while the girl cuts her eyes back and forth between them, punching buttons without looking. “What about your strategic plan?”

“Yeah,” Marty says, feeling his neck heat up despite the outward innocence of Rust’s tone. “Definitely a little bit of strategizing, too.”  
  
  


“Hope you weren’t watching this,” Rust says approximately thirty-eight minutes into the film, the first damn thing he’s uttered since the title credits rolled, and before Marty can move Rust is already on him, licking hot and wet into the seam of his mouth. He tastes like a warm swig of candy-sweet booze and if Marty was already a little buzzed, he’s all the way there now.

“What if I was?” he says as Rust pulls the beer out of his hand and breaks away to swing a leg around, straddling across his lap. “What if this is the best movie I’ve ever seen?”

“Then you’ve got some terrible fucking taste,” Rust says, pushing Marty’s head back against the couch to mouth around his jaw, sucking little bites along the line of his neck. “But we both know that’s not the case.”

The movie keeps rolling in the background, throwing pale shadow figures across the darkened walls and over Rust’s back as he starts working the buttons at the front of Marty’s shirt. Marty isn’t doing much to help the cause, one hand up under the hem of Rust’s wifebeater pressed flush against the warmth of pale skin, the other raking through the man’s hair and dragging heavy all the way down to the curve of his ass.

Rust shoves his tongue back in Marty’s mouth when the last button comes undone, syncing up perfect with the ringing chime of the doorbell.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Rust hisses against the corner of Marty’s mouth, breathing out like a slashed tire. “You left the porch light on.”

“How else are we gonna get rid of all this fucking candy?” Marty says, throwing a hand across his eyes as Rust unfolds himself from his lap and stands. “Go answer it this time and then just leave the bowl out there, they can help themselves.”

“You want me to answer?”

“Rust, I’m half-hard and my shirt’s undone—for Christ’s sake, just dump some shit in their bags and try not to look like you’re gonna kill someone.”

“Thought that was the whole fucking point,” Rust says, considering his gun where it sits on the counter for a split second before wedging the popcorn bowl full of candy against his hip. He pads out of the kitchen on bare feet and Marty swears he can hear a quietly practiced mantra of _Happy Halloween, little fuckers_ trailing along on the air behind him.

The front door swings open to reveal an astronaut in high-top sneakers and a bucktoothed werewolf, both roundabout ten years old with bulging pillowcases fisted in their hands. Rust blinks at them and they blink back, and then a small voice from somewhere below is saying, “Tricky treat,” petal-soft and bashful.

Rust looks down and nearly drops the bowl, has to press the plastic hard into his stomach like a counterweight, and of course—of fucking course, like the universe’s had his number all along—she’s there, a little girl of about two or three dolled up in a pink tutu and a pair of glitter-dusted fairy wings, staring up at him with her hair pulled high into curly pigtails on either side of her head like a memory cut clean from an old photograph.

The world is turning on a tilt-shift axis while the outside air has gone static to the touch, and his senses are dialed up so high he can almost hear the fluttering wing-beat of two moths circling the yellow porch light above.

“Happy,” he tries the first time, and has to suck in a breath before both words pull free. “Happy Halloween.”

He’s got a death grip on the popcorn bowl and the two boys look at him expectantly until he can refocus on their faces, holding out the candy stiff-armed after a delayed misfire. A younger woman stands at the foot of the porch in a black t-shirt that has a tiny skeleton printed over the soft swell of her stomach, hair the same honey brown as the little fairy. The lines of her body are at ease, eyes peeled watchful as the astronaut and werewolf each pluck two pieces out of the bowl and then scamper back off into the night.

The fairy holds her orange plastic pumpkin out, still only about knee-high princess crown and all, and before he even thinks it through Rust’s already sinking down in the doorway on creaking joints to take a knee, holding the bowl out for her to peer into with wide hazel eyes.

“What looks good?” he asks, trying on a weak smile. “You can pick.”

The door eases back open behind him and Rust knows Marty is leaning in the jamb with his good ole’ boy smile plastered on, because the woman’s brows briefly raise before she smiles softly in return, absently running a hand over her stomach.

Shyly—and not before sizing up the old black bird taking wing down Rust’s arm—, the little girl reaches into the bowl and pulls out a single pack of malted milk balls, long lashes sweeping over her cheeks as she looks down to drop them into her pumpkin.

“Good choice,” Marty says, winking. “Those’re my favorite.”

“What do you say, Emma?” the woman asks, and the little girl hoists her loot up and runs back to her mother, who hooks the candy bucket around two fingers before taking her fairy’s hand.

“Thank you!” Emma says, beaming before she turns and hops off the porch step in a flutter of wings and tulle, narrowly missing two pumpkins as she goes.

Rust climbs back to his feet with the candy bowl still in hand and finds Marty at his shoulder when he turns to go inside.

“You gonna leave it out here?” he asks, quiet, plucking a roll of Smarties from the mix and letting Rust’s hips bump up against his as he slips sideways through the open door.

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, and fishes a piece of caramel from the bowl before setting it back down on the porch. He pops it into his mouth and then presses his lips to Marty’s, sliding up against him right there in the foyer.

“You still wanna finish that movie?” he asks, getting his hands around Marty’s hips.

“Fuck no,” Marty growls, and flips off the overhead light.  
  



	3. 2014

The beer-and-pumpkin run perhaps turns into an annual sort of thing, and Marty can never quite coerce Rust into wading through a patch to pick out his own but he’ll tag along for the ride anyhow, keeping watch leant up against the truck or a wooden tent post like some old smoking scarecrow.

A casual romp through the liquor store takes no time flat: two sixers of the usual because they both know what they like and then a tall bottle of pumpkin beer that had grinned at Marty from the back cooler, something he recalls from years gone but hasn’t touched inside the better part of a decade. When he pushes back out into the burnt ochre of Louisiana autumn he finds Rust canted up against the truck bed, elbows braced with his hands hanging slack over the side, rolling the odd penny between finger and thumb.

Traffic hums past laced with the sounds of thumping bass and somebody’s hacking tailpipe, and if Rust were any kind of four-legged beast his ears would be pricked in the direction of the building across the street, twitching with each new eruption of shrill, throat-raking screams that burst forth from the storefront with blackened windows.

“Haunted house,” Marty says, propping himself next to Rust and squinting off into the lowering shade of dusk. “Haunted strip mall, more like. I guess they leased it out for a couple weeks and turned the place into some kinda shit show.”

“You ever been inside one?”

“A fucking lifetime ago, but with that cover charge they slap you with nowadays? Hell no.”

Rust turns just enough that he can see Marty from the corner of his eye, profile backlit by vivid ribbons of violet and orange. “You scared?”

_“Am I—?”_ Marty pushes off the truck as he laughs, head tipped back toward the darkening sky. “What the fuck do you think? I’m sure whatever’s in there is sugarplum visions compared to the shit we’ve seen. You wanna get scared, take a walk through the hell either one of our brains still stirs up on any given weeknight. It’s free.”

Rust stares at him for a moment and then pulls his key ring loose, unlocking the truck and gesturing for Marty to set the beer in the floorboard. “C’mon,” he says. “Wanna go see what they’re carrying on about. I’ll buy your ticket.”

Marty stands outside the open door, unmoving, hands pressed flat against his thighs. “You must be shitting me right now.”

“I ain’t,” Rust says, jamming the door shut and locking back up, moving to bump his shoulder up against Marty’s as they fall into a matched stride. “We’ll call it a date.”

“Swell fucking idea you’ve got for a date, Rust. I could do with a little wining and dining, maybe seeing that movie that came out last weekend, and here you wanna drag both our PTSD-laden asses into a haunted house.”

Rust looks both ways and then leads the way into the street, stepping quickly over the median as a pair of headlights come to life in the near distance. “You said yourself that whatever’s in there can’t hold a candle to what we’ve touched,” he says. “Chalk it up to an investigative learning experience.”

“Learning what—that people nearly shit themselves over things that aren’t even as bad as what we’ve perused over morning coffee?” They step onto the shoulder on the other side of the road and Marty nearly eats it on the gravel, swearing fast as Rust catches hold of his elbow and leads them both up to the blacktop. “What could you possibly find in there?”

Another gust of screams streaks through the parking lot, overlaid with the buzzing grind of what sounds like a revving chainsaw. Somebody has set a flashing strobe up just inside the open door and suddenly all Marty can think about is one of those old timey movies where a farmer has to throw his shirt over a horse’s head to lead it out of a burning barn.

“Not much,” Rust says a few cues too late, watching tendrils of fog machine smoke curl around their feet as they get closer. “Solace, maybe.”  
  
  


“Just you two?” the woman in the makeshift ticket booth asks, peering at Rust and Marty through gossamer strands of faux cobweb. She leans forward in her seat to look on either side like there may be a swarm of guerilla teenagers crouching around their feet, but the next group of patrons stands several yards back, a group of college-aged girls dressed as themselves in cutoff denim and sweatshirts.

“Just us,” Rust says, and passes a couple bills through the little window. The woman has talon-like nails glued to her fingers and has to slide the money off the counter before she can pick it up to count, shuffling through the cash drawer with black-lacquered claws.

“You’re all set,” she says, handing Rust a wad of change. “No touching the performers and no flash photography. If you get disoriented follow the footprints on the floor and try not to run into anything.”

“Y’all don’t have any waivers to sign, any kind of disclosure agreement?” Marty asks her, eyeballing the prosthetic stab wound torn into her clavicle, oozing a gummy trickle of wine-dark blood. “What if somebody drops dead of a heart attack?”

The woman points to her left at a sign bolted next to the window. “We’ve had people throw up and one girl pissed herself last week but so far nobody’s died in five years running. Couple busted shins, but that’s only the idiots who get lost and take off running blind.” Her eyes flick over them in a cursory kind of survey, taking in Marty’s Saints t-shirt with the long sleeves pushed up around his elbows, the breeze carding easy through Rust’s hair, gone mousy-light with age. “Y’all look a little more subdued. I wouldn’t worry about the maze giving you any trouble.”

“Yeah, we’ve had some practice,” Marty snorts, but Rust is already ushering him toward the door, pushing him along with two fingers pressed light against the small of his back.

Blood-spattered plastic flaps like you’d see in a meat packing plant hang in the doorway and Marty stops up fast before Rust can push through them, snagging the hem of his shirt to skip ahead.

“Hold up,” he says, blinking against the strobe leaking distorted through the plastic. “I’m taking the lead on this one.”

“Alright,” Rust drawls, taking a step back. “Go on ahead, then.”

Another chainsaw revs violently inside over what sounds like some doomed soul shrieking in agony and Marty narrows his eyes, leveling Rust with a look.

“You’re just gonna let me? No fight or nothing.”

Rust barks out a guffaw. “It ain’t real, Marty.”

“Even still,” Marty says, and when Rust moves to take the lead again Marty bars him with his arm, pushing forward beyond the plastic into a cloud of strobe-lit fog.

They walk headlong into an ersatz graveyard, the floor mounded up with piles of dirt and fake blankets of mossy lichen. Weeping angels and a massive stone reaper stand guard over caskets open and shut, some of them jumping around and rattling in binding chains, the others full of howling actors and dummies in various states of rot and decay.

“Looks about like the family reunions I used to go to as a kid,” Marty says over the gnashing and wailing of the undead, though he swerves fast when an arm pops out of a coffin to his right as if to grab his leg. He hisses something nasty under his breath and bumps back into Rust’s shoulder, shaking his head as if to clear it before moving on between two crumbling headstones flanked by the towering reaper.

As they make to pass through a high gate leading further into the maze the statue comes to sudden life and swings its scythe in front of them, cutting through the air in a gleaming arc before resuming its static pose near the makeshift mausoleum.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Marty says appreciatively, peering back over his shoulder at Rust. “You see how fucking close that was?”

Rust looks about the same as he does when he’s watching the Monday morning weather report, though an ounce of mirth crinkles up in the corners of his eyes, shining violet under the throw of red lighting. “Look up there,” he says, and Marty groans deep in his chest as they walk straight into the circus room.

“Fuckin’ clowns,” he murmurs, edging past one that has her hands full of slippery pink intestine pulled fresh from the cadaver on the floor, ripping and swinging them through the air like a jump rope. She cackles as she skips, reciting nursery rhyme and shrieking in spurts, black blood smeared around her mouth and slapped in frantic handprints all down her chest.

There’s a trapeze made up of human limbs swinging empty from the vaulted ceiling and a handful of other heathens dancing around amidst the tinkle of what sounds like a child’s music box, but it’s not until a clown covered in a dirty frock and ruffle pops out from behind a backlit tent flap do they determine the source of the chainsaw.

The engine revs and the fucker scurries across their path with the thing raised like a battle axe, and all Marty knows is that somebody is shouting bloody murder and then he’s full-braced back against Rust with his arms thrown out to either side, a gust of surprised breath puffing hot in his ear.

Familiar hands find his waist and Rust is laughing against him, bonafide fucking laughing, and the clown is already gone but Marty blinks and finds himself standing there in some kind of power ranger stance, heart hammering a mile a minute while the sharp burn in his throat tells him he was the one squealing like a sissy in the face of a fake murder clown.

“This is some real bullshit,” he says, swallowing hard and shoving Rust’s hands off. “And you back there—fucking laughing at me? Here I was, trying to protect your ungrateful ass. From here on out you can fend for yourself.”

“My hero,” Rust drawls from somewhere behind him, and together they push forward through the rest of the maze behind a screaming throng of other people, through a backwoods slaughterhouse decorated with flayed human hide and a spinning hallway of funhouse mirrors that swing out to reveal some howling haunt every few feet. Rust’s sights skim over some of the actors and don’t even bother with others, busy watching Marty flinch and do some kind of fast-footed shuffle away from the shit that catches him on unawares.

He doesn’t say anything when—as they walk through a pitch-black tunnel, air somehow pressing cool and wet against his face—fingers suddenly find his in the dark, squeezing warm and solid and decidedly not letting go.

Rust drives Marty forward with a thumb planted at the base of his spine—only briefly pausing to consider a made-up cadaver with its face peeled off on the torture rack, split and flayed instead of yanked down, strangely enough—and knows they’re nearly out when he sees the exit sign glowing green at the end of the final room ahead.

“Last one, hotshot,” Marty mumbles, and leads Rust straight into the cool blue-white of an asylum.

The feverish shrieking and bloodcurdling burr of a chainsaw is gone here, replaced with a tangible sort of heaviness infused with the sound of static broadcast snow. Blood and bile spatters white tile walls in slapdash arterial sprays and most of the actors here don’t cackle and roar—they cry, beg, and shout for mercy, dragging their bodies across the floor and rending themselves like rag dolls, pulling fistfuls of hair and dissolving into wild fits while blood dribbles from their mouths and chins.

Off to the side—not even the main attraction of the room—an actor lies strapped down to a gurney, arms and legs straining against the buckled straps holding him there. He doesn’t yell so much as sob, eyes pared wild with something clenched between his teeth, and Marty is getting ready to say _Rust, you paid thirty bucks for this shit_ when the hand in his falters and then tightens like a vice, Rust suddenly pressed rigid up against his back and forcing them both headlong through the plastic flaps and back out into the night.

“Well shit,” Marty says, blinking at Rust. “I guess we got our money’s worth.”

Rust draws in a tight wisp of air, already leading the way back to the truck. “Guess so.”

The screaming and wailing muffles and gradually seals off behind them, and Marty doesn’t open his mouth again until the haunted house is a good twenty paces gone, glaring hard at a herd of teenagers who clap and wolf whistle as they pass by.

“The fuck they hollering about?” he mutters, and when he makes to throw up the bird with his right hand he finds, very suddenly, that it’s still wrapped up in Rust’s.

“Oh,” he says, looking down. “Huh.”

Rust lets go to fumble around for his cigarettes, lighting up and sucking off a long pull as they stroll into the empty street, angling off toward the liquor store parking lot. “Hope that beer’s still cold,” he says, unlocking the truck and swinging up behind the wheel. “All this fucking excitement’s got me thirsty.”

“C’mere,” Marty says as the engine cranks over, and as they meet somewhere halfway across the bench with two goddamn pumpkins in the floorboard and a couple sixers sweating in the seat between them, Rust figures yeah, this is probably the kind of solace they were looking for.  
  
  



End file.
